"Michael J. Kane" wrote:
> At 09:42 AM 9/28/00 -0400, John W. Kulig wrote:
>
> >(snip)
> >Say, isn't it time we revived our discussion about how awkward the term
> >"significance" is for p statements? For the "n th" time, wouldn't
> >_reliability_ be the better word? If p < .05, we conclude the results of
> >the study will repeat if the experiment was replicated. That, in my book,
> >is the definition of reliability. This was we can dispense, once and for
> >all, with adjectives before the word "significance."
>
> Hi John,
>
> I'd be interested to hear what other Tipsters have to say about this. I don't
> teach stats, but my hunch is that using the word "reliability" would likely
> lead students to understand that p = .05 means "if we repeated the study
> 100 times,
> we'd get this result 95 times", when in fact, p = .05 means that *if the
> null hypothesis
> were true,* then we'd only expect to get this finding 5 times out of a 100.
You're probably right. Even within the status quo, many students misinterpret
the p anyway. They think it's the probability of the null hypothesis given the
data, rather than the probabality of the data given the null hypothesis.
--
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John W. Kulig [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Department of Psychology http://oz.plymouth.edu/~kulig
Plymouth State College tel: (603) 535-2468
Plymouth NH USA 03264 fax: (603) 535-2412
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"What a man often sees he does not wonder at, although he knows
not why it happens; if something occurs which he has not seen before,
he thinks it is a marvel" - Cicero.
